Birth of a Hypno-Fetish

HORROR FANS of the baby-boom generation were excited in 1998 when VCI Home Video released fully restored, letterbox VHS and laserdisc editions of Horrors of the Black Museum (1960), a psychological horror film originally distributed to theaters and television by American International Pictures (fig. 1).

Of particular interest to fans was the restoration of a twelve-minute prologue, missing for years from television prints, featuring a lecture on and demonstration of hypnosis by "renowned psychiatrist" Dr. Emile Franchel.¹ Franchel talks about hypnotic suggestion, and then he speaks with a young woman under hypnosis, who giggles and states that she "felt fine," while the camera focuses on three hypodermic needles inserted into the fleshy part of her arm. Finally, the doctor turns to the camera, in order to place the film audience under a hypnotic trance. All of this was to demonstrate "HypnoVista," which places the audience into a trance of terror through a careful orchestration of color, light, music, and sound.

In reality, HypnoVista was yet another threadbare marketing gimmick used by distributors of low-budget horror films both to differentiate their product from its host of competitors and to exploit the public's fascination with the unprecedented-and since unequalled-technological innovations characteristic of Hollywood in the 1950s. Other examples of this kind of hype include "Psycho-Rama," in My World Dies Screaming (1958), an effort by Howco International to cash in on the mid-1950s controversy over subliminal advertising; "Hypno-Magic," an extended audience-hypnosis sequence in Allied Artists' The Hypnotic Eye (1959); and "Percepto," the most famous of producer William Castle's gimmicks, in which viewers of Columbia's The Tingler (1959) were subjected to mild electric shocks from wired theater seats. In addition to these hypnosis-themed publicity stunts, these films, and dozens of others, from Shock (1947) to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), from I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) to House on Haunted Hill (1958) and Peeping Tom (1959), replaced the traditional evil manipulator of the thriller and the mad scientist of the horror film, with the scheming or misguided psychiatrist.

Why did popularized discourses of psychiatry coalesce around the narratives and publicity efforts of the low-budget shocker in this period? One explanation is offered by Mark Jencovich in Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s.² Jencovich argues that a crucial component of 1950s horror in both fiction and film is the fear of the increasing top-down management of both economic and psychic life in rationalized, postwar America. Rational Fears offers a persuasive range of evidence to support this thesis and draws supporting examples from all sub-genres of horror and science fiction. Jencovich concludes with an analysis of Psycho (1960), resituating Hitchcock's film as a culmination of, rather than a break from, 1950s discourses on psychic life and criminal pathology.

I think this is only part of a larger explanation, however. As would many other examples from the low-budget, genre cinema of the period, this cycle of films offers significant insight into the complex interweaving of the aesthetic, technological, social, and economic histories of American film during the industry's precipitous and sustained decline in box-office attendance after the war. This was a time when the major studios cut back drastically on production, and theaters often found themselves with little product to play. In addition, both the star system and the genre film were undergoing significant changes: many aging stars of the studio era were not being replaced by younger ones able to bring audiences into the theaters, and films without stars sought other elements to emphasize in their publicity. Similarly, the telecasting of several studio's pre-1948 film libraries, including Universal's horror hits of the 1930s and 1940s, had made younger moviegoers familiar, even over-familiar, with genre conventions that had sustained the horror film for decades. The increasingly outlandish plots and publicity stunts characteristic of the hypnosis films were a response to both of these developments. Finally, the hypnosis films' use of the figure of the evil psychiatrist and the incorporation of hypnosis and magic into publicity discourses represent a particular inflection of narrative and stylistic elements of the horror film present from its very beginnings.

The success of the low-budget genre cinema in the 1950s was due, in large part, to the curtailment of production by the major studios. According to Gary Edgerton, the period between 1953 and 1968 saw a consistent and sustained decline in movie attendance in the United States.³ As a result, the majors produced fewer features every year, and more of these films were expensive blockbusters showcasing technology such as widescreen, stereo sound, and color. Production fell steadily: 479 features in 1940, 379 in 1950, 271 in 1955, and an all-time low of 224 in 1959.⁴ The efforts of exhibitors to withstand this period of fewer releases and declining attendance included strategies as diverse as cultivating the youth audience, financing their own productions, and sensationalizing their advertising.

Both exhibitors and distributors actively courted the youth audience, by mid-decade the most loyal box-office patrons. By the summer of 1957. movie attendance by young adults and middle-aged patrons had drastically declined. A poll conducted by Alfred Politz Research, Inc., and presented in Motion Picture Herald revealed that "52.6 percent of those who attend movies once a week or more are 10 to 19 years of age." The same survey concluded that the statistically "typical frequent moviegoer" was "a teenager in high school, who comes from a family that is financially well-off, and perhaps which intends to send him (or her) to college."⁵ James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff, of AIP, pointed out to Motion Picture Herald in 1957 that the films offered to the youth audience "must not ever, under any circumstances, seem to have been especially chosen for them, conditioned to their years, or equipped with special messages." Thus, the formula for the AIP programmer was to provide the familiar B-picture genres-horror, science fiction, action-adventure-but to present them in ways that distinguished them from their television, radio, or comic book versions.⁶

Stars remained vital to the film industry in this period of rapid change. However, the aging stars from the studio era were only slowly being replaced by younger stars with box-office appeal to younger audiences. In 1956, the exhibitor trade group Allied States Organization bemoaned the lack of "new faces" as an industry ill at least as devastating as the cutbacks in production.⁷ This "star shortage" was seen as a critical component of the "product shortage" of the 1950s,⁸ because without a star, even a moderately budgeted film was treated in the marketplace like a programmer. Further, the abandonment of "B" film production by the majors eliminated the primary means by which those studios nurtured new talent.⁹ As Trueman Rembusch, former president of National Allied, told the Senate Small Business Committee in 1956, "The lifeblood of the motion picture theater has always been the introduction of new personalities that attract hordes of fans. Limiting the production of pictures prevented the development of new talent and has brought on, since 1947, the spectacle of the grandma and grandpa entrenched stars acting like youngsters, to the distaste of the important teen-age patron group. As my 18-year-old daughter says, 'Clark Gable and Joan Crawford acting like young lovers. Ugh!'"¹⁰

Sensational content and wild promotional gimmicks like "Psycho-Rama" and "Hypno-Vista" were, in effect, end-runs around the absence of stars in the films.¹¹ Thomas Doherty, in Teenagers and Teenpics, quotes an advertising director for a distributor of horror films who saw the advantages of a movie poster that was independent of stars or even narrative content: "This is something we can really get our teeth into," said the unnamed ad man: "Here, finally, we have a batch of films without any big stars. We can build our ads around the "horror" angle, the picture itself, if you will. We don't have to worry about having the players' names in the same type size as the title of the picture itself, or about the position of the star's head in the ads. It's all pure punch, with no dilution."¹²

Statements like this were part of a growing perception within the industry that its advertising and promotional techniques were behind the times. In 1955, an editorial in the Screen Producers' Guild SPG Journal suggested, "Motion picture advertising is far behind the motion picture parade. To survive and thrive, films have to adjust to an ever-changing pattern: but their advertising is still cut from the same musty mold."¹³ Consequently, the 1950s saw the growth of ad campaigns, exploitable titles, and poster art that preceded the casting or even scripting of the films.

An increased attention to trailers was part of this industry-wide concern. The importance of trailers in the promotion of features was underscored by national polls taken in 1957 and 1958 by public relations firm Al Sidlinger and Co. The polls found that in a 19-week period, 35 percent of filmgoers surveyed in 1957, and 43 percent in 1958, cited the trailer as a primary reason they had attended a particular feature.¹⁴ In 1955, Frank Whitbeck, head of the trailer department at MGM, told Motion Picture Herald that he and his department followed a film through all of its phases-writing, shooting, and editing-and, when the film reached the rough cut stage, "[sat] down with the staff and kick[ed] the picture around. How are we going to sell it to the public?"¹⁵

By contrast, AIP's Herman Cohen, fresh from the huge success of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, told Time magazine in 1958 that that film's catalog of attractions had formed the basis for its publicity campaign and, later, its story. "I always think of the title first," he said. "The story comes last. After the title come the advertising ideas-the gimmick, the illustrations [and presumably, the trailer], for these are what get the kids into the theater. Then comes the story-and every drop of blood and graveyard shudder must be as advertised." Cohen, like his bosses Nicholson and Arkoff, wore the mantle of the mountebank showman proudly. Arkoff defended their advertising policy with the assertion that "the film industry is a carnival business and it must deal therefore in carnival terms."¹⁶

In a 1955 letter to Motion Picture Herald, an exhibitor writes, "Trailer advertising is No. 1 in my book for publicizing a picture. It reaches the eye of those you've hooked as movie patrons."¹⁷ This wishful reference to mind control and addiction is not coincidental. By the end of the decade, exhibitors and trade journals were insisting that the insights Madison Avenue had gleaned from clinical psychology be brought to bear on the moviegoing public. Of particular interest to several exhibitors and trade publications was motivation analysis, a growing field of research that attempted both to uncover the preconscious and unconscious motivations behind a person's consumption habits and to design advertising campaigns that would appeal to those motivations. In 1956, the Theater Owners of America, an exhibitor trade organization, hired promotional consultant Claude Mundo as an administrative assistant.

At the TOA's annual meeting in Los Angeles, Mundo asserted, "Mental manipulation is what the industry's showmen need."¹⁸ Julius Gordon, owner of the Jefferson Circuit of central Texas, suggested that this would be a fertile field, and trade journal publisher Martin Quigley called for "a study by one of the organizations specializing in motivational analysis [that] would attempt to find out precisely how these psychological factors affect a person's decision to attend a theater"; the "clues" uncovered would help exhibitors achieve "maximum attendance for each attraction during its release."¹⁹ In 1957, the advertising manager for MGM addressed the Alumni Association of Post Graduate Hospital in New York and suggested that moviegoing should be part of the pharmacopoeia. According to theater manager Walter Brooks, the MGM man "stressed the therapeutic value of going out to the movies, and urged the doctors to recommend the tranquilizing screen and to prescribe pictures instead of pills."²⁰

"You Must Become Caligari!" Cinema of Attractions and the Monstrateur

The two figures lurking in the paragraphs above, the carnival barker and the clinical psychiatrist, have a long and storied history in the horror genre. The carnival barker, with his direct address and broad theatrical gestures, predates the cinema; he is the bridge between the normal world of the spectators and the exaggerated and often frightening world of the carnival attraction. At a crucial moment early in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the evil mountebank exhorts the fairgoers to enter his tent to see the somnambulist Cesare: "Step up! Step up! The amazing CESARE, who has slept for twenty-five years, is about to awake: Don't miss this!" He pulls back the tent flap with his cane to gesture the audience inside (fig. 2). Inside the tent is yet another doorway, beyond which stands an upright, coffin-like box: using an identical gesture, the mountebank opens the coffin to reveal Cesare and points to him with his cane. Caligari, the fairground barker, is also the master of the asylum; the final imprisonment of the protagonist, Francis, follows a parallel succession of diminishing spaces: from the yard of the asylum, to the halls inside, to Francis' cell, and finally to his straightjacket.

These interlocking and diminishing spaces are mirrored in the film's narrational space. Within the space opened by the intertitle that introduces the film, "A tale of the modern reappearance of an nth century myth," exists Francis's narrated tale of the hypnotist Caligari and the murder of Alan by Cesare. On this diegetic level, Caligari is both mountebank showman and insane psychiatrist. Inside of this narrative is Caligari's diary, which tells of his own hallucination that he "must become Caligari" and provoke Cesare to commit murder. At the end of the film, Francis is revealed as a patient in the asylum, and Caligari is revealed to be the benevolent psychiatrist. The doctor then announces that he "now know[s] how to cure" Francis, and the film ends with an iris-in on the psychiatrist's face. Werner Krauss' look almost directly into the camera suggests yet another space, the space of the theater and the audience, and the look that links these spaces is considerably more menacing than Kracauer's description of "all mildness."²¹ In fact, this look into the camera replays for the viewer one of the most frightening moments in Francis' story: the revelation that Caligari is the head of the asylum, a fact communicated by a direct look into the camera that had been cued to Francis' subjectivity. In the horror film, the look into the camera is the inverse of the genre's other central icon, the unseen threat behind the door. The look extends the paranoid world of the film forward into the space of the audience; the closed door extends the threat behind the screen.²²

Captioned as: Figure 2. The sinister mountebank Caligari, flanked by a poster depicting the somnambulist Cesare, pulls back the flap of his tent to usher fairgoers inside. Werner Krauss in Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, Southern Methodist University.

In his work on the preclassical cinema, Andre Gaudreault has written of the two "divergent regimes" that have remained co-present throughout the history of film. The first, "exhibitionist confrontation," is characterized by a seemingly unmediated rapport between the viewer and the onscreen spectacle. This regime is the basis of the cinema of attractions, which, according to Eisenstein and others, was capable of eliciting an immediate physiological response from the spectator in the manner of a fairground spectacle. Exhibitionist confrontation was the dominant mode of the preclassical cinema of the turn of the century. The second regime, "diegetic absorption," is characterized by spatio-temporal consistency and by the use of active narrative agents familiar from narrative forms such as the novel and the short story.²³

For Tom Gunning, one of the strongest markers of the cinema of attractions is the direct look of a character into the camera, not a look of a subject caught unaware but a look of intention, a gesture "undertaken with brio."²⁴ As a matter of fact, as early as Melies' magical films, the look into the camera was often associated with an onscreen master of illusions (or monstrateur, in Gaudreault's phrase). This suggests that the property of showing, or monstration, was often inscribed into the diegetic world of the film itself in the form of a figure or character, like Caligari, who controls and changes the space around him (such figures were virtually always male). Of course, the direct look at the audience suggested the ontological impossibility that monstrateur and audience could share the same spatial and temporal continuum. Thus, the co-presence of the cinema of attractions with the cinema of diegetic absorption often involved a complex reciprocal relationship between monstrateur figures in the diegetic world and the overarching narrational and stylistic processes of the film as a whole.

In the horror film, many features of a presentational mode that predates the cinema (the emphasis on the narrative's status as a tale, the almost ritualized foregrounding of the processes of narration, even the embodiment of these textual features in a magician or trickster) continue to exist alongside (and often in conflict with) the more self-effacing mode of the classical system. Gunning has argued that in the cinema of attractions, "theatrical display dominates over narrative absorption, emphasizing the direct stimulation of shock or surprise at the expense of unfolding a story or creating a diegetic universe."²⁵

The direct address's mirroring of the space of the story and the space of the spectator, with a hypnotist-monstrateur standing in between, recurred in horror films over the next several decades, in Warning Shadows (1922), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Dead of Night (1945), and Curse of the Demon (1957). It also provided the organizing principle for Arch Oboler's highly successful Lights Out! radio horror program in the 1930s and 1940s, and for the "masters of ceremonies" of E.G. horror comics in the 1950s. These Caligari-like figures, variously psychiatrists, carnival barkers, warlocks, and hypnotists, can be seen as emblems of the forces that mediate between, on the one hand, the horror genre's eruptions of shock and spectacle and, on the other, the efforts of the narrative both to impel and to contain those eruptions. This sideshow magician, who determines what we see and hear (as in "WE control the horizontal-WE control the vertical") is also the voice of the horror film's publicity and promotion. Like Caligari standing outside his tent at the Holstenwall fair, William Castle, Samuel Arkoff, and other itinerant sorcerers mesmerize us with their stare and their inviting gestures.

One of the most common strategies used by exhibitors to promote the horror film of the 1950s was the attempt to break open the enclosed space of the screen, to extend the film's diegesis into the theater, lobby, or street. Prospective viewers of horror films were often confronted by "displays consisting of skeletons, coffins and gravestones, models or actors dressed as Dracula, Frankenstein, or other fictional fiends, nurses stationed in the lobbies with first-aid equipment, and the serving of 'courage cocktails.'"²⁶

In an instance of the direct address characteristic of the horror genre, the eyes of the monster were often a prominent feature of horror displays. The Booker Theater in Richmond, Virginia, stimulated a healthy run for AIP's Voodoo Woman (1957) by using a life-sized display a week before the film's premiere. The zombie woman in the display had hollow eyes.²⁷ The Ritz Theater in Tiffin, Ohio, promoted The Fly (1958) by enclosing the box office except for the speaking hole in the front. Inside the box office was a green light, creating the impression of a fly's green eyes. In addition, the theater manager displayed two oversize models of houseflies borrowed from a local exterminator, one of which pleaded through a tape recording, "Let me out! Let me out!"²⁸

A similar principle governed the more centralized promotion used by distributors. Strongly influenced by the tradition of the fairground showman, the theatrical trailers and one-sheet artwork for the releases of American International, Allied Artists, Astor Pictures, Filmgroup, Crown International, and smaller distributors were often characterized by hyperbole and a catalog of the film's highlights, a method Samuel Arkoff called the "four sees approach" (fig. 3). Gunning has noted that currents of the cinema of attractions remain in the classical cinema: he gives an example from the 1920s of a Boston theater that actually posted a timetable of the main attractions in Ben-Hur (1924).²⁹

By the mid-1950s, distributors of the horror film had so refined this trope that the suggestiveness, youth parlance, and implicit sadism of their promotions for a time far outstripped anything attempted by the major studios. Teenage Werewolf producer Herman Cohen doubtlessly conceived the gruesome and misogynistic murder set pieces of Horrors of the Black Museum, as well as its HypnoVista gimmick, before the screenplay was written. "It actually puts YOU in the Picture. Can you stand it?" screams the video box in ad copy inspired by the film's one-sheet poster. Below this, is written "HypnOvista," with a sinister, hypnotizing eye in the center of the "o."Then, below this, a breathless elaboration of the film's attractions. "SEE-the Vat of Death! See -The Fantastic Binocular Murder! Feel-The Icy Hands! Feel-The Tightening Noose!"

Captioned as: Figure 3. The "Four SEES" approach to publicity. Ad art for Day the World Ended (1954) and Phantom From 10,000 Leagues (1954). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

This ascendancy of the cinema of attractions at the expense of the cinema of narrative integration was to become one of the strongest markers of the genre's low-cultural status. The hypnotist huckster was not a welcome figure on the American cultural scene. Concurrent with the film industry's attempt to reach out for audiences (pun intended) through baroque stunts and outrageous gimmicks was the controversy over subliminal advertising, part of a larger concern over the increasingly sophisticated means of alleged mind control and brainwashing used by both ad agencies at home and totalitarian regimes abroad. Many films of the period attempted to exploit the fear of hypnosis and the dissolution of personality through the recurring character of the evil psychiatrist; at the same time, Vance Packard, in The Hidden Persuaders, was outlining the extent to which the desires of consumers were being manipulated by the "depth psychologists" employed by ad agencies.

Packard topped the 1957 bestseller lists with his expose of the advertising industry's cynical manipulation of consumers through techniques learned from psychology and psychiatry. It was "depth psychology," the study of preconscious and unconscious fears and desires, that provided the scientific basis for motivation analysis.³⁰ According to Packard, by the early 1950s, advertising agencies and marketing firms had begun to retain large numbers of clinical and academic psychologists as consultants in their efforts to develop ad campaigns that bypassed the rational and critical faculties of consumers and zeroed in on their hidden, even unknown, fears and desires. Packard's portrayal of depth psychologists and advertising executives lording it over a modern Bedlam is more than metaphoric: early in the book, he describes a "research director of a major ad agency, a tense tweedy man [who had] once worked as an aide in an insane asylum!"³¹

In Packard's demonology of Caligari-like hypnotists, the main villain is Dr. Ernest Dichter of the Institute for Motivational Research, Inc., one of the so-called fathers of depth analysis. Packard portrays Dichter's lair as a gothic castle, complete with a panopticon worthy of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse: "His headquarters, which can be reached only by going up a rough winding road, are atop a mountain overlooking the Hudson River, near Croton-on-the-Hudson. It is a thirty-room field-stone mansion where you are apt to see children watching TV sets. The TV room has concealed screens behind which unseen observers sometimes crouch, and tape recorders are planted about to pick up the children's happy or scornful comments."³²

The carny barkers of the movie business were described by the popular press in terms similar to Packard's condemnation of Dichter. A 1960 article in Time refers to Nicholson and Arkoff of AIP as "the leading magicians in the field" and claims that Nicholson, Arkoff, and Cohen are "the three Merlins."³³ A 1958 Variety headline asked, "Is the Carny Come-On Necessary?" This linking of hucksterism and magic has a long tradition in American culture. Jackson Lears, in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, refers to the emergence of advertising in nineteenth-century America as "the modernization of magic," and traces the rise of the itinerant patent-medicine salesman and his carnival barker's address to prospective buyers: "The desire for a magical transformation of the self was key element in the continuing vitality of the carnivalesque advertising tradition, and an essential part of consumer goods' appeal in nineteenth-century America."

By the 1950s, pop culture had transformed the elixir-wielding fairground barker into a psychiatric sorcerer. Many horror plots of the mid1950s contained a central motif either of reincarnation or of the regression of the protagonist into monstrosity. The immediate source of this plot was the best-selling The Search for Bridey Murphy, which recounted the supposed regression of a young woman to a past life.³⁴ The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956) was brought to the screen by Paramount, and many topical exploitation films adopted the reincarnation motif. Even prestige pictures such as Vertigo (1958) contained elements of the Bridey Murphy motif (derived, in this case, from its literary source, D'Entre les Morts, by Boileau/Narcejac). In 1957, AIP used Bridey Murphy elements in The Undead, She Creature, and I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The psychiatrist in each of these narratives was loosely based on Caligari.

In 1958, small distributor Howco International released a double feature of the showbiz melodrama Lost, Lonely, and Vicious and the William Castle-derived shocker My World Dies Screaming. The latter was an attempt to capitalize on the controversy surrounding subliminal perception in advertising, and it claimed to feature the process of "Psycho-Rama," hidden images designed to trigger the audience's emotional responses. Howco was formed in 1951, when J. Francis White, owner of the Consolidated Theater chain of 31 houses in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and Joy Houck, owner of the 29-house Joy's Theaters chain in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, merged their companies. Howco Productions contracted with Hollywood independents for features to fill its own theaters' schedules and for eventual national distribution.³⁵ The product shortage, which affected both first-run and subsequentrun theaters, had led to calls for exhibitors to finance their own productions, enough for a year-round supply, and several regional and national circuits attempted to do so.

Howco's attempt to link horror and subliminal perception was right in step with the concerns of many social critics, who saw the growth of horrific entertainment and the mysterious mental manipulations of the culture industry as fundamentally linked. For example, the 1957 meeting of the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters' Code Review Board issued warnings to broadcasters that both the use of subliminal perception and the "use of horror for its own sake" by latenight movie programs were to be eliminated by subscribers to the Code. In a similar spirit, the New York Assembly twice considered legislation banning the commercial use of subliminal perception, once in 1958 and again in 1959.³⁶

Producer William Edwards gave a trade screening of My World Dies Screaming in April 1958 in which alternate scenes showed the film first with its "subliminal" messages and then with the exaggerated and noticeable "supraliminal" symbols. (This demonstration was later made into a prologue for the film.) Of course, this was pure hype and hucksterism, and Motion Picture Herald had a month earlier sarcastically predicted that it would soon be possible "for a showman to tell his patrons they are seeing a second-feature picture unconsciously, at the same time they are seeing the top-feature consciously. . . . Look how much film rental, and runningtime, a showman could save that way."³⁷

With its therapeutic investigation of the protagonist, Sheila, the narrative of My World Dies Screaming mirrors the subliminal messages aimed at the viewer. The film begins with the credits over an abandoned, moss-covered house, as an eerie theramin melody plays on the soundtrack. In a bargain version of the beginning of Rebecca (1940), the camera begins a slow zoom into the front of the house. Off screen, we hear Sheila's voice:

And through the branches of the old trees, I can see the house again. It sits there waiting for me, silent, malignant, a place of unspeakable horror. On a mailbox at the side of the house I can make out the name of the people who lived there once. Tierney. But the Tierneys must have gone away a long time ago. And the house stands like a mouldering tombstone to a world that died.

In one of the horror genre's most common figures, the front door swings open by itself. A handheld camera walks up the stairs as the voice-over continues: "I go up the stairway to find the answer to what has always dragged me here." The ever-diminishing interlocking spaces of the house continue as she proceeds up the stairs, into an alcove, and up to the attic door. The camera stops, and Sheila says, "I know why I had to come to this place."

A shock cut rends the soundtrack and the visual: Sheila screams and a hypnotist's spiral spins its vortex in closeup (fig. 4). Sheila is shown lying on a psychiatrist's couch, coming out of a hypnotic trance. The psychiatrist tells her that the dream is a symptom of a terrible trauma hidden in her unconscious. "Whenever something is too unpleasant, too shameful for us to entertain, we reject it, we erase it from our memory," he tells her, "but the imprint is always there, nothing is ever really forgotten." Here the film comes as close as possible to explaining the Precon process to the viewer. The nameless dread from Sheila's past, buried deep in her unconscious, mirrors the film's subliminal "imprints," which will remain below the level of the viewer's consciousness yet will nevertheless cause palpable, unexplainable dread and horror.

Captioned as: Figure 4. Sheila (Cathy O'Donnell) relives a repressed childhood trauma under hypnosis in My World Dies Screaming (1958). G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, Southern Methodist University.

Sheila suffers from memory blackouts and she plans to leave Switzerland to go back to the United States with her new husband, Phillip. The film's central enigmas will be drawn from two distinct but related genres: the psychological thriller provides the neurotic protagonist whose unconscious must be probed for the trauma responsible for her symptoms; and the female gothic furnishes the mysterious character of Phillip, the husband who may or may not be attempting to drive her insane, a la Gaslight (1944). The two return to Phillip's ancestral home in Florida, and Sheila is paralyzed with fear when she discovers that Phillip's house is the house from her nightmare.

At the end of the film, Phillip is revealed to be a benign hypnotist, having brought Sheila back to the house where she witnessed, as a small child, the axe murders of Phillip's siblings (the similarities to Marnie [1964] are striking). The murders, we learn, were committed by Phillip's half-brother, initially presented as the gothic heroine's helper and confidante. Thus, the film's investigation of Sheila's unconscious provides her with an unknown "past life" to which she can regress under the threatening but beneficent eyes of Phillip. The audience is, supposedly, subjected to series of emotional jolts via the "subliminal" Precon images, which parallel the two trance-like manipulations to which Sheila is subjected , the hypnotic pull of Phillip's ancestral mansion, and the psychiatrist's vortex wheel, which begins the film's present-day narrative.

The spoken prologue was repeated in The Tingler (1959), when director William Castle explained that "certain audience members" would experience a tingling sensation during the film's horrific highlights. Then, in 1960, AIP used the HypnoVista prologue with Emile Franchel in Horrors of the Black Museum. This film featured Michael Gough as Edward Bancroft, a pop criminologist who drugs and hypnotizes Rick, his young assistant, into committing a series of gruesome mutilation murders (the film's opening features a woman's eyes being punctured by spring-loaded needles hidden in a pair of binoculars), which the psychologist then analyzes in books and magazine articles. The highlights of the film are several highly sexualized murders that evoke the prologue's image of the attractive woman with needles in her arm: one woman is murdered with ice tongs in her throat, and Bancroft's drunken mistress is decapitated in her bed by a jerry-built guillotine.

Many of these murderous props are taken from the secret "black museum" over which sinister monstrateur Bancroft presides as master of ceremonies in several private scenes with the young Rick (fig. 5). The Caligari-Cesare relationship between Bancroft and Rick is generously larded with both sadomasochistic and homosexual overtones: taking his hypodermic out of the cabinet to inject Rick, Bancroft rhapsodizes, "It's like everything else in life. Flowers wither without sunlight, humans perish without food. The wish to serve unquestioningly, the gift of true obedience, these too need to be nourished, reinforced. Rick, look at me. Roll up your sleeve. Extend your arm." His sway over the young man, who physically as well as morally regresses under his spell, is identical to the Bridey Murphy motifs in She Creature and I Was a Teenage Werewolf.

Captioned as: Figure 5. Caligari and his murderous somnambulist, circa 1959. Bancroft and Rick (Michael Gough and Graham Curnow), from Horrors of the Black Museum. G. William Jones Film and Video Collection, Southern Methodist University.

Bancroft's entreaty for Rick to murder the fiancee who threatens their relationship is almost identical to the lines spoken by Dr. Brandon to the young teenage werewolf: "Rick, do you remember how it was the last time and the time before that? The freedom, the strength, the black terror in others but not in you? The mastery you shared with me? [. . .] All this will be ours once again." The film climaxes, naturally, at a local carnival, with Rick murdering his fiancee Angela in the tunnel of love. Trapped like an animal on the stilled Ferris wheel, he leaps from his perch and stabs Bancroft as the police look on.

These motifs achieved their most florid and freakish expression in an unusually lurid horror programmer, The Hypnotic Eye (1960). The film was made independently for Allied Artists by screenwriter and producer William Read Woodfield, who told film historian Tom Weaver of his inspiration for the film in a 2000 interview:

I'm driving along and I'm seeing the white line on the road. I look at the white line and I say to myself, "You know, you could make a movie about this!" People would come into the theater . . . the picture would start . . . and it's just a white line, just like the one on the road. A voice would say, "All right, everybody - just relax. Keep your eye on the white line." . . . [A]nd we'd keep getting them under deeper and deeper hypnosis. Ultimately we'd tell them it was the greatest movie they ever saw in their life and to tell all their friends. Goodbye! The post-hypnotic suggestion would be, "Talk it up!"³⁸

The Hypnotic Eye was an attempt to capitalize on the gimmicks innovated at AA by William Castle and on the cycle of hypnosis and mind control films I have just described. The film stars Jacques Bergerac as the Great Desmond, a stage hypnotist who places attractive women in a trance onstage. These women later mutilate themselves at home in gruesome "accidents," the film's central attractions. One woman rinses her hair in the gas burner instead of the sink, another lowers her face into an electric fan, and a third washes her face with sulfuric acid.³⁹

A police detective and his partner, a criminal psychologist from the department, investigate the mutilations, while the detective's girlfriend begins an investigation of her own after her best friend is disfigured after appearing onstage with Desmond. Near the end of the film, a five-minute sequence similarto the "Percepto" stunt in The Tingler shows monstrateur Desmond in his stage act hypnotizing both his live audience and presumably, by staring directly into the camera while speaking his incantations, the movie audience as well. The name Allied Artists used to promote this gimmick, "Hypno Magic," condenses the motifs of hypnosis and sorcery into a single phrase.⁴⁰

Like the AIP's horror films of regression and reincarnation, The Hypnotic Eye presents a gruesome mirror image of Jackson Lears' idea of the buyer magically transformed by the conjuror's trick: the very products that Desmond's female victims are conditioned to believe will make them beautiful are transformed into tools of scarification and self-mutiliation through Desmond's hypnotic power. The punishment visited on these women is extreme even by modern standards (fig. 6), and the mutilation scenes are staged in a manner identical to beauty-care commercials of the late 1950s.

The precredits sequence of The Hypnotic Eye, in which a woman "washes" her hair in the flames of gas stovetop, is a grisly parody of a 1950s television commercial for cosmetics. Like many of the horror films from this period, the images and icons in The Hypnotic Eye that suggest the horrors of mind control and the dissolution of personality are strikingly similar to the tropes of hypnosis and thrall that characterized both advertising's trade discourse and the warnings about that discourse in The Hidden Persuaders. A 1962 trade ad in Variety by the CBS Television network shows a young woman peering out from a television screen as she applies mascara to her left eye. In front of the television set sits a young woman with an identical hairstyle applying mascara to her right eye, in perfect symmetry with the woman onscreen, as if she were looking into a mirror (fig. 7). The tag line reads, "A reflection of television's power over women."⁴¹ Two of the film's most striking images, the acid-scarred Dodie looking into the mirror and registering the damage done, and the entranced Marcia looking into the mirror at Desmond approaching from behind, use identical compositions (fig. 8).

Captioned as: Figure 6. Ads for The Hypnotic Eye (1960) portrayed expanded norms of female attractiveness as a comic dystopia. Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Writing three years before The Hypnotic Eye, Packard quoted an unnamed ad executive who pointed out that women who respond to such advertisements "are buying a promise. . . . The cosmetic manufacturers are not selling lanolin, they are selling hope."⁴² The Hidden Persuaders tells of a study undertaken by social-psychologist-turned-adman James Vicary to investigate why women had drastically increased their rate of impulse buying in supermarkets. Using hidden cameras to observe the eye-blink rates of women as they shopped, Vicary measured the level of anxiety of these shoppers. Packard describes the results:

Their eye-blink rate, instead of going up to indicate mounting tension, went down and down, to a very subnormal fourteen blinks a minute. The ladies fell into what Mr. Vicary calls a hypnoidal trance, a kind of light trance that, he explains, is the first stage of hypnosis. . . . [M]any of these women were in such a trance that they passed by neighbors and old friends without noticing or greeting them. Some had a sort of glassy stare. They were so entranced as they wandered about the store plucking things off shelves at random that they would bump into boxes without seeing them.⁴³

Captioned as: Figure 7. "Expose the ladies to a new product on television one day, and you can be sure they will be looking for it in stores the next." Trade ad for the CBS Television Network (1962). New York Public Library

Captioned as: Figure 8. Stage hypnotist Desmond works his odious continental savoir-faire on heroine Marcia. Jacques Bergerac and Marcia Henderson in The Hypnotic Eye (1960). Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

Near the end of The Hypnotic Eye, Dave attempts to rescue the hypnotized Marcia from her lethal participation in Desmond's stage act. Then, several minutes feature Desmond, onstage in the theater within the film, performing directly into the camera as the narrative comes to a complete stop.⁴⁴ In medium shot, Desmond announces that members of the audience will now have the opportunity to "cross the dark, mysterious threshold of your own subconscious mind." Looking past the camera, he asks, "May I have the house lights, please?" At this point, the projectionist in the theater showing the film turns the house lights up to dim. Each of the events that follow engage the audience in highly repetitive hand motions while their eyes are fixed on the screen, in attempt to cause dizziness. Desmond instructs the audience to take out the "hypnotic eye balloon" they were given upon entering the theater. Like Dave, Marcia, Dodie, and Miss Scott in the film, the audience in the theater blows up its balloons and ties them off. This phase of the trick is similar to the child's game of spinning around in circles and then being bearhugged from behind: now out of breath and light-headed, the theater audience sees the house lights go suddenly down and hears Desmond intone, "Now - If you dare, look into the hypnotic eye!" He produces the light, shown in extreme close-up, strobing on and off and creating a vertiginous flickering in the auditorium as a spectral soprano voice plays on the soundtrack.

Suddenly, a woman planted in the theater screams in unison with an unseen member of the audience in the film, and both the crowd on the screen and, presumably, the crowd in the theater look nervously around for the fainted woman. The narrative is rapidly re-established with a close-up of Marcia, staring ahead under Desmond's spell. Dave and Phil attempt to rush the stage. Desmond and Justine, his assistant, are killed in the rescue attempt, and Marcia is pulled to safety.

Breathing a sigh of relief, the benign psychiatrist Phil walks out from behind the curtain and addresses the audience in both the theater and the cinema:

Ladies and gentlemen, a word of warning. Hypnosis, although an important and valuable medical tool, can be extremely dangerous when used by untrained or unscrupulous practitioners. Therefore never allow yourself to be hypnotized by anyone who is not your doctor or who has not been recommended to you by your doctor [HE TURNS TO LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE CAMERA], not even in a motion-picture theater. Thank you.

The film fades to black, and "THE END" appears over the Allied Artists logo. This moment of direct address is virtually identical to the final shot of Caligari and echoes the "audience warning" featured at the ends of films as disparate as The Tingler, Peeping Tom, and, most spectacularly, Psycho.

In many respects, the marginal but commercially successful low-budget films of the late 1950s and early 1960s were prescient about the changes the American film industry would adopt over the next two decades. The promotional gimmicks of the hypnosis films and the other features of this new cinema of attractions, including the special effects of the 1950s monster and invasion films, found their way into the diegesis of the genre films of the 1970s and 1980s in the increasingly elaborate special effects that were, for many films, often the sole focus of publicity. The "juvenilization" (in Thomas Doherty's phrase) of movies and their theatrical audiences, begun in the 1950s, continues to this day.

Several distribution strategies innovated by smaller studios for their downscale genre releases became increasingly characteristic of major-studio strategies in the New Hollywood: publicity and promotional budgets would come to dwarf the production budgets of many releases. In addition, the huge multi-screen opening, used for horror and sci-fi double bills in the 1950s and 1960s, would be adopted for major studio releases, and many high-profile studio films would play the larger theater circuits during fallow periods in the release calendar. For these and other reasons, the low-budget genre cinema of the 1950s and 1960s is an important part of the crucial transition from the decline of the studio system to the conglomeration of the New Hollywood. A detailed history of the horror film in this period must take into account the changing relationships between the production, distribution, and exhibition branches of the American film industry.